Chris's AIX Blog

I received an email this week from a
colleague that worked with me on the NIM
Redbook back in 2006. He was experiencing an issue with DSM and NIM. He was
attempting to use the dgetmacs
command to obtain the MAC address of the network adapters on an LPAR. The
command was failing to return the right information.

I experienced this very issue during
the writing of the AIX 7.1 Differences
Guide Redbook. And given that I was in Austin, sitting in the same building
as the AIX development team, I was able to speak with the developers directly
about the issue. At that time they provided me with the following workaround.

First they asked me to check the size
of the /usr/lib/nls/msg/en_US/IBMhsc.netboot.cat message
catalog file.

# ls –l /usr/lib/nls/msg/en_US/IBMhsc.netboot.cat

-rw-r--r--1 binbin3905 Aug 08 09:54

They were surprised to find that the
file appeared to be “too small”. They promptly sent me the catalog file from
one of their development AIX 7.1 systems.I replaced the file as follows:

# cd/usr/lib/nls/msg/en_US/

# ls -ltr IBMhsc*

-rw-r--r--1 binbin3905 Aug 08 09:54
IBMhsc.netboot.cat

# cp -p IBMhsc.netboot.cat
IBMhsc.netboot.cat.old

# cp /tmp/lpar1/IBMhsc.netboot.cat.new IBMhsc.netboot.cat

# ls -ltr IBMhsc*

-rw-r--r--1 binbin3905 Aug 08 09:54
IBMhsc.netboot.cat.old

-rw-r--r--1 binbin26374 Dec 23 11:24 IBMhsc.netboot.cat

This fixed the problem for me during
the residency.

So I asked my friend to do the same
(after I sent him the message catalog file). He ran the dgetmacs command again and this time it returned the MAC address
for all the network adapters in his LPAR. Success!